Newswise — The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society is pleased to announce that Lisa Sanders, MD, will keynote the 2014 International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care: Leading the Way, to be held March 16-19 at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers in Chicago, Illinois.

Sanders will talk about how doctors deal with diagnostic dilemmas and examine a collection of difficult medical diagnosis cases from both patient and physician perspectives. She writes the popular “Diagnosis” column for The New York Times Magazine, which was the inspiration for the long-running and acclaimed Fox television program “House M.D.” She is also the New York Times best-selling author of Every Patient Tells a Story.

The health-care symposium, now in its third year, provides practical and actionable methods, guidelines, and best practices that will enable participants to advance their human factors/ergonomics approaches and outcomes in their respective work settings. Unique to this symposium is the inclusion of manufacturers, health-care providers and policy makers, who will give cutting-edge presentations and engage in discussions about challenges in health-care delivery and how human factors/ergonomics science and practice is meeting those challenges.

The symposium will include more than 200 presentations organized in four tracks: Health-Care Provider and Patient Safety, Clinical and Consumer Health-Care Information Technology, Medical and Drug-Delivery Devices, and Clinical Care Settings.

GfK, a world-leading research company with offices in Chicago, is the 2014 symposium host. “As researchers and designers, we work side by side with providers, manufacturers, and government to ensure the safety of health devices and information technologies,” said GfK’s UX Executive VP Robert Schumacher. “This event recognizes the impact human factors has on users of these devices.”

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society is the world's largest nonprofit individual-member, multidisciplinary scientific association for human factors/ergonomics professionals, with more than 4,600 members globally. HFES members include psychologists and other scientists, designers, and engineers, all of whom have a common interest in designing systems and equipment to be safe and effective for the people who operate and maintain them. “Human Factors and Ergonomics: People-Friendly Design Through Science and Engineering”

Plan to attend the HFES 2014 Annual Meeting in Chicago in late October. The Call for Proposals is now open.